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Prevent posting to future, non-existing, or closed periods.

7/18/2008

In payables and receivables users are able to enter transaction dates that are not in existing fiscal periods. This doesn’t happen often, but once in a while, a typo will cause a transaction to get posted into a future year, so you end up with a payables invoice in 2088 instead of 2008. Once this is posted, it’s pretty difficult to fix.

To avoid this, Microsoft offers a free add-in called Document Date Verify. It is a chunk file that gets installed on every computer where you want it, there are no SQL components to install or anything to maintain. If you enter a date in a fiscal period that does not exist, you will get a message that the fiscal period has not been set up yet and not allow you to continue. If you enter a date in a closed, you will get a warning message making sure that you want to continue, even thought the period is closed.

To obtain this add-in, contact either your GP Partner or Microsoft Professional Services.

 

Giving GL Detail to Auditors Using SmartList

7/3/2008

Many auditors ask for a detailed list of all GP transactions in electronic format.

The Account Transactions SmartList provides a perfect way to get this list and export it to Excel.

However, if you have already performed the GL year-end close in Dynamics GP, there are some things that need to be filtered out before giving this list to the auditors. If you simply filter on the transaction dates, you will end up with some doubled up numbers due to the year-end close transaction and any transactions that may have been posted to the closed year after the year-end close.

There are 2 ways to filter out everything you do not want:

1. Add a column called Source Document and only search for transactions where the Source Document is not equal to “BBF” or “P/L”.



2. Add a column called History Year and only search for transactions where the History Year is equal to the fiscal year you need.
   
   For example: If your fiscal year ended 5/31/2008 and in GP that is defined as your Fiscal Year 2008, the you want to search on History Year is equal to 2008.

And don’t forget to change the Maximum Records number SmartList will be returning, since the default 1000 records will probably not suffice.

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Tip: Stop with all the reminders already! (6/23/2008)

Most GP users have the Reminders window pop us as soon as they open up GP. And what’s the first thing they do? Close that window without ever looking at it.

If you’d like to get the reminders to stop popping up automatically, here is how:

GP 10.0: On your Home Page, hover over the top right corner of the To Do section to bring up the additional icons and click the Change Details icon (the one that looks like a pencil). Check the box under Reminders to display the GP reminders in the To Do section. This will make the reminders show up on your Home Page under To Do instead of coming up as a separate window. If you don’t want the reminders showing up in the To Do section either, then while on the To Do Details window, click on the blue arrow next to the Reminders, uncheck all the boxes in the Remind Me column and remove any Custom Reminders in the list at the bottom.

GP 9.0: On your Home Page click the drop-down arrow for the To Do section and choose Change Details. Check the box next to Microsoft Dynamics GP reminders. This will make the reminders show up on your Home Page under To Do instead of coming up as a separate window. If you don’t want the reminders showing up in the To Do section either, then while on the To Do Details window, click on the blue arrow next to the Reminders, uncheck all the boxes in the Remind Me column and remove any Custom Reminders in the list at the bottom.

GP 8.0: Since there is no Home Page in GP 8.0, you can’t have the Reminders pop up anywhere else, so the best you can do is turn them off. To do that, go to Tools>Setup>User Preferences, click on Reminders and uncheck the boxes under Remind Me. Then click on Tasks and delete any pending tasks - you can filter on pending tasks by clicking on the drop-down arrow above the Task column.

Please Note: Reminders and the Home Page are GP user ID specific, so any changes you’re making will apply to all companies you log into on any computer.
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Tip: General Ledger Transaction Entry window; Inadvertent Deletions. (6/9/2008)

On the General Ledger Transaction Entry window, if you make changes (or even click around enough without making changes) and then close the window, GP will prompt you with the following question:

"Do you want to save changes or delete this transaction?"

Save, Delete, and Cancel are your choices.

Many users do not take this message literally, and think it is asking if you want to save or delete your changes. That is not the case! Read it again. If you click Save, your changes will be saved. If you click Delete, the entire transaction will be deleted. Yes, the entire transaction. And there is no undo button.

Over the years we have seen a number of cases where GL transactions are inadvertently deleted this way. To address this, in the last few version of GP (starting with version 8.0) there is a setting to control whether deleting of saved GL transactions is allowed. To find it go to Tools > Setup > Financial > General Ledger – it is the second choice under "Allow". We recommend leaving this unchecked. If you actually need to delete a GL transaction, temporarily change the setting, delete the transaction, then go back and uncheck the setting again.
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Tip: Making Autocomplete more user friendly. (6/2/2008)

We get a lot of calls from customers saying that Autocomplete, while a very nice feature, gets very cluttered up over time. If you have a lot of old entries in your Autocomplete lists, you can clean them up in two ways:

1. Manually clear out unwanted entries: When the autocomplete list comes up, right click on the choices you do not want to see and choose Remove From List.
2. Change settings to keep track of less days or less total entries:
1. For GP 8.0 and 9.0: Go to Tools > Setup > User Preferences, click on the AutoComplete
2. For GP 10.0: Go to Microsoft Dynamics GP > User Preferences, click on the AutoComplete.
3. If the number of days is zero, unused entries will never be removed. We've found that typically 45 or 60 days is more than enough for most users.

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Tip: You can save a lot of time when typing dates in GP! (5/26/2008)

If you are in a date field anywhere in GP, and it is set to date, you can change the day by typing in 1 or 2 digits. For example: The date is currently set to 05/29/2008, click on it and type 3 and it will switch to 05/03/2008. If the date is blank, entering just the day will automatically fill in the current GP system month and year.

If you'd like to change both the month and the date, type in the 3 or 4 digits for month and date - the year will simply stay there. Example: The date is currently 06/12/2008, click, on it and type 531 and it will switch to 05/31/2008. Type 601 to switch to 06/01/2008.

Only if you have to change the year should you ever be typing out the whole date. Go ahead and try it! We find this saves a lot of typing in a typical day.
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Tip: Entering Credit Card cash receipts when the processing fees are taken out of every transaction  (5/19/2008)

When your credit card processor takes processing fees out of every transaction, it's difficult to enter all the necessary information at the time of the Cash Receipt. Here is a way to set up GP to make this easier:

1. If you don't already have one, create a new GL account called Credit Card Receivable.
2. Set up (or change) the credit card (Tools > Setup > Company > Credit Cards) to be a Charge Card instead of Bank Card. That means it will go to a GL account instead of a Checkbook. Select the GL account you created in step #1 for this.
3. When a customer pays with a credit card, enter the entire amount they paid (the actual amount that will show up on their credit card bill) and apply that to the proper customer invoice(s). The credit card processing charges should not be shown on the customer's payment record.
   
   This cash receipt, when posted, will credit AR and debit the Credit Card Receivable account.
4. When you get the payment from the credit card processor enter it as a Bank Transaction of type Receipt. The debits will be to your bank account and processing fees, the credit will be to the Credit Card Receivable account. For example, if the customer paid you $1000, but there is a $20 processing fee, so you get $980, the transaction will be:
   
   Debit Cash for $980
   Debit Credit Card Processing Expense for $20
   Credit Credit Card Receivable for $1000

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